


Consumer Culture and Modernity

by nanda (nandamai)



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies), Mad Max: Fury Road
Genre: Badasses Being Adorable, F/M, Fluff, Frivolity, Happy Healthy Citadel Tag, I Did Not Make Up the Mall Blame George and Nico, No Socks, Pants, Underground Mall, Underwear
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-06
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 08:10:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5156510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nandamai/pseuds/nanda
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"What in the hell has this got to do with my pants?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Consumer Culture and Modernity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fadagaski](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski/gifts).



> Prompt at end.

"That's it. You _are_ crazy," Max says as he stares down the gaping maw of what he would otherwise have thought was a mine shaft. He kicks a pebble over the edge. It takes too long to hit anything, in his opinion.

Furiosa holds out one of the harnesses. "It's not as bad as it looks."

"What in the hell has this got to do with my pants?"

"You'll see," she says with a secretive smile. "Harness."

He takes it, reluctantly. He's used to jury-rigging everything, not using quality equipment, and he stares at it for a while. It's old but it's been very well cared for, and he's afraid he'll break it. 

Furiosa steps easily into hers, yanks it up smoothly, and cinches it tight. Then she looks at him. "You have no idea what you're doing, do you?"

"No?"

She doesn't make fun of him, like some people would. She takes the harness from his hand and drops to her knees. His dick, unfortunately, takes notice, and she looks up with one raised eyebrow.

He shrugs. It happens.

She loosens the straps, says, "Put your hand on my shoulder," and guides his feet one by one through the loops. From there it gets a lot more complicated.

"This does not look wise," he says.

"Don't be a baby. Turn."

Then it's around his hips and she's tugging the straps so tightly it seems like it should hurt, but it doesn't. He squats and stretches his legs and it doesn't pinch at all. 

"Where'd you get all this stuff?"

"Here. You'll see."

Next there are ropes, and hand-forged connecters, and things she calls uppers and downers. The ropes clip into hooks that are buried deep in the sand until she digs them up, knowing exactly where to look.

She goes first. He tells himself it's stupid to worry when she's better at this than he is. Then she tugs the rope twice to tell him to join her.

As he descends, he sees broken glass, strange patterns of light reflecting from the shaft, desert dust motes floating in the air, sand coating every surface, but under the sand he sees colors.

 _Colors._ The kind they only see now in sunsets and sunrises and gardens and people's eyes, bright and natural and synthetic colors he'd forgotten completely.

"It's a fucking mall," is the first thing he says when his feet hit the floor.

"Yep."

"What did you -- how --"

"He found it," she says. She never says Joe's name, so neither does Max. "Soon after he took over the Citadel. There's been a lot of damage, but it's been shored up many times." She points to a wall where he can see ladders and steel shelving used as beams. "No one's died here in years."

Max is still stuck on the first part of this conversation. "You brought me to the mall to go shopping. For _pants_?"

She smiles. "Yep."

He spins slowly in place, holding up their lantern, trying to see everything. She's busy unhooking and anchoring the rope, taking off her harness and backpack and leaving them on the floor, so after a few more turns he does the same.

"Come on," she says. "Long time since I was here. We'll have to find our way around."

Max has seen a lot of ruins. He's seen plenty of collapsed malls. But this thing is still intact. The moving stairs -- escalators, he dredges up from somewhere -- don't work, but they're safe to climb. The floors seem solid, though half the tiles are missing or cracked and they have to watch their feet. The railings overlooking the lower levels have fallen in many places, but it's easy enough to avoid them.

"You brought me to the fucking mall," he says again.

Furiosa seems to be enjoying his astonishment. She slows down to let him take in the view.

"Was it always underground?" he asks. Maybe that's why it survived.

"I don't know," she says. "Nobody knows."

There's so much. Did humans ever really need this much? Electronics stores, that place they used to call a food court, a store that sold nothing but calendars, the sporting goods store the climbing equipment must have come from, a whole store full of swimsuits. Unsurprisingly, they're all still on the racks. The ocean went away.

Furiosa catches him staring. "Close your mouth. You'll catch flies," she teases.

"No, it's the colors. People used to wear colors like that every day." He can't even picture it, colors like that, outside. Before.

There's a toy store, a pharmacy their monster of a doctor must have raided, two bars. All the bottles have been broken or stolen -- he checks, even in the storage rooms, to Furiosa's amusement. Store after store of women's clothing the boys had no use for. Too bad Joe liked to keep his wives and the milking mothers in rags, when all this was available. There are two big banks with the vault doors torn off. He knows where one of them went.

Eventually, she finds what she's looking for, in a big store that seems to have everything. He stares at shelf upon shelf of denim, and looks at her in awe. 

She shrugs. "There were strict rules about what we could take. He gave the boys clothes from his old army base."

She starts rifling through the piles, but stops in frustration. "I don't know how these sizes work," she says. "Do you remember?"

He does, a little. He's on the small end, he knows that. He unfolds the sizes one by one, holding them up against his body, and replacing them carefully when he decides they aren't right. They're all too long, but that was always a problem, he remembers.

Furiosa kneels and unties his boots.

"In the way," he mutters as he tries to reach for something and gets tripped up.

"Just be still for a second."

He sighs and lifts his feet again, as obediently as he did with the harness. It's good that she's so comfortable with his body, he reminds himself. He doesn't usually have trouble remembering, but he isn't usually shopping for clothes.

She takes off his brace and his pants, and then he's half naked. He gave up on underwear long ago.

"That's on the list, too," she says.

It takes about five tries until he finds a pair that fits, and then he looks for a shorter length. He'll have to cut them off anyway, but at least his feet don't swim in the ones he ends up with. 

Furiosa tells him to turn around with mischief in her eyes, and whistles when he does.

"You have an ulterior motive," he says.

She grabs his ass and tells him to take three pairs, one for wearing and two for saving. They can't come back often, she says.

Shirts are much easier: a couple with long sleeves, a couple with short sleeves, in desert colors. The fabric is nice and warm and not caked with sweat and dirt the way even clean clothes get after years of wear. While he's picking them out, she goes to fetch a couple plastic bags. Plastic! 

Then, having packed everything and handed him the bags, she glances at the outerwear.

"No," he says. She's already promised him he can use his old leather pants to repair his jacket, anyway. They're still in his hand. He waves them, smugly, in front of her. 

With a sigh he knows is for show, she moves on. "Won't find many socks down here anymore," she says. 

"Don't need 'em. Don't you want some jeans?"

"No." But he thinks she looks regretful. "This is my uniform now, really. Let's find you something soft to sleep in." And that answers the question of where she got the loose shorts and top she wears to bed, the ones he loves to slip his fingers under. He imagines her doing the same and agrees readily, letting her choose the colors. She chooses blue.

"Now." She turns, holding up the lantern, then heads off when she sees what she needs.

It's women's underwear, not the slinky stuff they walked past earlier, but practical cotton in packs of five or ten. She looks him up and down, squints, and squats to find a size. Finally she hands him something called "boy shorts." Jessie never wore those. He's never seen them before.

"For me?"

"Go look in the men's section, then," she says. She's already searching for more and collecting a pile by her feet.

He looks over his shoulder. "It's empty, isn't it?"

"Try those on."

They're okay. A little tight in the front, and they feel strangely illicit, not, he thinks, because they're women's -- because it's been so long since he wore anything that hugged his ass so well. It's blissful. He goes two sizes up anyway, and puts his jeans on over them.

Furiosa selects a variety of styles and sizes for the other women. "It has to be something no one else will see."

He looks down at his fancy new clothes.

"You're different," she says. "It's no surprise when you're surprising. We'll dirty those up on the way home, anyway."

"Sounds fun."

After that, it's mainly more sightseeing. The kitchen store is nearly empty; all the pots and pans were melted down. The furniture store was raided for cushions and mattresses and firewood. There are the most ridiculous shoes, heels and men's dress shoes and rain boots and flip flops.

They pick out a few things for Dag's son, who gets rashes from all their blankets and from human hair sweaters. Furiosa takes some yarn from a craft store for the three former milking mothers who like to knit. 

Max looks surreptitiously at a store he knows he won't get her to enter.

"Would you," he says. "Can we get you something pretty and frivolous?"

"There's nothing I need." 

"I said _frivolous_."

She looks dubious, but agrees to turn her back and wait while he runs to one of the many cheap jewelry stores he saw earlier. All the precious metals were also melted down, and she would hate the waste, anyway.

He stands in the middle of the store. Not earrings. Not a necklace; she'd need help putting it on. A bracelet, though -- the slide-on kind -- simple and silver. If she wears it at all it'll only be in their room, but he _likes_ that. He quickly chooses one that's smooth and narrow and plain, and refuses to show it to her when she asks.

She's smiling, though, as she says, "I think that's every --"

"Is that chocolate?" He stares. It's an entire chocolate store, another thing he'd forgotten.

"I wouldn't eat it if I were you," she says.

"Iron stomach, remember?"

She holds up her hands as if to say, _It's your funeral._ But he remembers something else from long ago, and ducks inside.

"Max, come on."

"Trust me."

He finds it in the back, in dusty, slightly rusty cans, but when he opens one, it smells perfect. He was never a big chocolate lover, but the scent still does something to his brain and he's sure it will for other people, too. He takes ten cans and, in a fit of absurdity, hides the rest in a drawer to come back to later. He has to take another bag.

He holds up a can as he walks back to her with a grin on his face. She squints at it. It's hard to read in the dark.

"Hot chocolate powder," he says. "This stuff lasts forever."

"How do you know that?"

"Survival skills course. Police."

"What's it like?" she says.

"Chocolate? You've never had chocolate?" His part of the continent seems to have collapsed much more slowly than hers, they figured that out long ago, but still.

"I did," she said. "As a child. But it was old and and I don't really remember."

"It's," he starts. "It's sweet. And rich. You mix it with hot water. This is enough to share at dinner."

She likes that, he can tell. She's more interested in the sharing than in the treat itself. But he knows how much she loves dried fruit, and he knows she'll like this. 

"You got me two presents," she says.

"You got me all of this." He holds up the bags. They're going to have trouble squeezing it into their backpacks.

"What," she says to herself, and a smile spreads over her face. She takes his hand and leads him to a store that sells only sunglasses. Many are broken, many are gone, but --

"He didn't like the boys wearing them," she says. "Thought it made them soft." She spreads her hands. "Well?"

"Furiosa, I don't need --"

"Max. Headaches," she says. He does get them, after twenty, thirty days in the wastes. "Which ones?"

"You pick."

She grins and peruses all the racks, looking back at him curiously now and again. He leans against what's left of the counter and enjoys the wait.

It takes a long time. She slips a pair on his face, shakes her head, takes it off, tries another. When she settles on one she nods and says, "Perfect." 

He doesn't care what they look like. If she likes them, he likes them. He puts them carefully into one of the bags.

It's time to head back. They'll need to take a circuitous route, just like they took to get here. He understands why, now.

He mostly understands why.

"Does it still have to be secret?" he asks as they stroll back towards the entrance.

She looks at him like he's stupid. 

"No, obviously, you don't want to put up signs. But there's so much."

"There's not enough," she says tightly. "How do we choose who gets clothed and who doesn't?"

 _You chose me_ , he's smart enough not to say. "I don't know, a lottery? If they think someone else deserves it more, they can give it away." He points over his shoulder, behind them. "Some of those dresses were so simple, and the boys get burned without paint. Your people -- our people," he corrects himself, because he knows it will make her happy, "they're resourceful. They make things last."

She frowns. The Citadel warped her brain in strange ways, just like the Wasteland warped his; spotting those roadblocks for one another is a big part of why their jagged edges fit.

"I'll think about it," she says with one sharp nod. But he's pretty sure they'll be back soon.

By the time they pack everything and reach the surface, the sun is low in the sky. He picks her up off her feet and twirls her around, just once, because his legs will get tangled if he keeps going. She kisses him on the nose. They're going to have to spend a night in the desert, and car sex with Furiosa is one of his favorite things.

After they've taken off the harnesses and coiled the rope, as they walk back to the car, he says, "I still can't believe you brought me to the fucking mall."

She slaps his denim-clad ass.

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt from the lovely and funny [fadagaski](http://archiveofourown.org/users/fadagaski): "Max's clothes give up the ghost. Furiosa takes him to the mall. Post-apocalyptic, buried in sand, but a man needs pants. Also, maybe there's chocolate."
> 
> (The title is stolen from a classic economics book. I'm not giving the author credit in hopes of keeping it out of serious searches.)
> 
> [Here I am on Tumblr and there's lots more Mad Max.](http://nandamai.tumblr.com)


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